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Monday, February 27, 2012

Privacy Rights v Open Records

Robert Freeman
 
Robert Freeman, Chair of the Committee on Open Government and a person who has extensive knowledge of New York State and Federal Freedom of Information laws, has recently quoted Civil Rights Law §50-a.  saying said that the annual performance ratings of all public employees in NYS are able to be FOIL'd, whether they are written in words and/or numbers, and there’s nothing the NY State Education Department could do to block the results of the teacher evaluation data from being released every year and printed in the media. He added that the performance ratings of all charter school teachers could also be FOILed, whether they participate in the TDR program or not.
 
Here is an article from Edweek on the issue of privacy v open records for public employees:
 
Published: May 10, 1989

Open Records: A 'Legitimate Public Interest'?

By Lisa Jennings, EDweek
 
When Madonna Tibor asked school officials in the small town of Hebron, N.D., to let her see the records of her son's teacher, she had no idea she was launching a freedom-of-information crusade that would send her first to the courts and then to the state capital. That was in 1987, when she and about 40 other Hebron parents were concerned over problems their children were having in a business-education class at the town's only school. They wanted to know whether any complaints about the teacher had ever been lodged with the school district. As a city worker, Ms. Tibor knew that the records of public employees were open in North Dakota, so she simply asked for the teacher's files.
"If the district had given us the information then," she says, "it would have done away with a lot of rumors and suspicion."

But the district refused, citing the privacy rights of the teacher.

Ms. Tibor has since won a victory in the North Dakota Supreme Court and a gubernatorial veto of legislation exempting teacher records from the state's open-access law. And she remains firm in her conviction that taxpayers deserve to know all there is to know about those who teach their children.
She is not alone. The Hebron case is one of several nationwide this year to focus attention on the delicate balance between a school employee's privacy and the public's right to secure protection for its children and accountability from the system.
Lawsuits over access to school personnel records have also been filed in Colorado, Connecticut, Texas, and Washington State.
Teachers' unions in those states have argued that because educators have already met certain minimum requirements when becoming certified and are continually being evaluated, their files contain more personal data than those of other public employees and should be accorded a different status under open-records laws.
But freedom-of-information advocates counter that open records are particularly important in education, where "accountability" has become the latest reform catch phrase.
Gov. George Sinner of North Dakota expressed these sentiments in his veto message on the teacher-exemption bill last month.
"Teachers, administrators, school boards, and students need to be held accountable to parents and to the public for their performance--or lack of performance," he said. "Open records help assure such accountability in North Dakota."
Every state has a law similar to North Dakota's. Often called "sunshine" laws, they determine whether and when public meetings or records will be open to citizen scrutiny.
Every state also has exemptions to these laws, usually to protect medical records, family information, and other personal facts not deemed of "legitimate public interest," according to a 1986 report on state sunshine laws by the Council of State Governments.
But in many states, the personnel records of school employees have remained largely unexamined--either because teachers' unions have successfully argued the issue of privacy rights, or because parents and other citizens have remained unaware of their rights under sunshine laws.
Peggy Portscheller, president of the North Dakota Education Association, says privacy was the key concern when her union took the position that the Hebron case amounted to little more than a "witchhunt."
"Our main bone of contention was the access to teacher evaluations,'' Ms. Portscheller says, noting that state law requires two such evaluations each year. "In order to protect the integrity of that process, we believe those records are best kept between employer and employee."
When Ms. Tibor's lawsuit reached the state supreme court in February 1988, the judge agreed with lower courts that teacher records could be inspected by anyone under the North Dakota law, because the legislature had failed to pass any laws exempting them.
That ruling, and the intense lobbying by the ndea that followed it, prompted lawmakers to take immediate action to close school files.
A bill adopted by a wide margin in both houses of the legislature early this year restricted access to the records of teachers, administrators, and higher-education faculty members, to supervisory administrators and school-board members. The proposal would have allowed those officials to discuss information in the files with parents.
But in his veto message, Governor Sinner said he saw no need for such confidentiality.
"The records are, after all, not 'per4sonal' files, but 'personnel' files," he wrote. "Given the critical role of education and the high percentage of public money expended on it, this bill moves in exactly the wrong direction."
Ms. Portscheller, who says she was "disappointed" by the veto, predicts that the action will "water down" the teacher-evaluation process. "Administrators will be reluctant to put anything substantial down in writing," she says, "and that is certainly not in the best interests of the public."
Ms. Tibor disagrees. "The evaluations won't be watered down if you have an honest administrator," she says. "He'll keep the truth in those files." She and her allies argue that, if the district has nothing to hide, there is no reason to close the files.
Parents and newspaper editors in Texas have contended in access battles there that school districts may in fact have something to hide.
Last year, the Houston Chronicle reported that at least five, and possibly as many as 25, administrators in the Houston Independent School District had purchased mail-order doctoral degrees from an unaccredited California institution.
When the newspaper sought to obtain the academic records of district personnel, however, the school system filed suit to block the request.
A county judge ruled in the district's suit last August that the newspaper lacked legal standing to seek an order forcing the disclosure of the records. The Chronicle has appealed that ruling.
The newspaper's own suit, meanwhile, was merged last year with a class action filed by a group of parents seeking the academic records of teachers in the Klein Independent School District.
The cases were split again last month, and last week a state judge heard arguments in the Houston case. According to Joel White, a lawyer for the newspaper, the judge has decided to review several transcripts to determine whether the information in them should be disclosed.
Litigation in the Klein case is expected to continue for another year or more.
Although teachers' records are generally considered open under Texas sunshine laws, Houston school officials have maintained that academic transcripts are protected by legal precedents established in 1987 covering such personal information as parents' address and religious affiliation, often included in college transcripts.
Lawyers for the district have also pointed out that educators are the only public employees that have their transcripts on file, submitted as part of the certification process.
But Tony Pederson, managing editor of the Houston Chronicle, sees the dispute as an instance of schools seeking to avoid their accountability to the public.
"It is impossible to accurately judge the competence and qualifications of those who make decisions in public schools without public access to those records," he says. "It's simply a matter of discovering flaws in the way the Texas Education Agency watches over the backgrounds of its employees."
Darah S. Headley, a lawyer representing the Klein district, agrees that accountability may be an issue in both cases.
"But we feel that using academic transcripts is a flawed measure8ment of an administrator's qualifications," she says. "And there is a lot of personal information included in those records that is unrelated to their course of study."
Attorney General Jim Mattox last month issued an opinion stating that academic records should be considered public information, according to his spokesman, Ron Dusek.
The opinion is based on court decisions, Mr. Dusek said, particularly a 1987 ruling by the state supreme court that the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act--known as the Buckley Amendment--does not cover an administrator's academic records.
Mr. Mattox had delayed his decision, however, to give the Texas legislature time to work on a measure that would specifically exempt sections of school employees' academic records, such as grades earned, from the sunshine laws.
Variations of the bill have passed both houses of the legislature, but lawmakers had not reached an agreement as of late last week.
Meanwhile, the Texas Education Agency has adopted a policy requiring all school administrators to have degrees from an accredited institution, according to Ms. Headley.
Superintendent Joan Raymond of Houston has also offered the newspaper a list of the system's administrators, with the college they graduated from. But this has apparently not satisfied the newspaper, which plans to pursue its lawsuit.
School officials in Washington State have made similar attempts to appease a group of newspapers seeking information on 89 former teachers who voluntarily surrendered their teaching certificates or had them revoked by the state.
Cowles Publishing Company, publisher of the Seattle Spokesman-Review and the Spokane Chronicle, requested the records from the state superintendent of public instruction in January 1988. The newspapers were investigating reports that teachers who had been accused of sexual misconduct with students had been allowed to leave the system quietly, unpunished and unreported.
"It's important for the public to know how these investigations were pursued," says Duane M. Swinton, a lawyer representing Cowles.
Last summer, a state judge ruled that the records should be released, with students' names deleted. (See Education Week, Aug. 3, 1988.)
But lawyers for Frank B. Brouillet, the former state superintendent, have appealed that decision and sought a temporary injunction to block release of the records.
Ralph E. Julnes, the superintendent's legal counsel, argued that the files contain much information considered confidential under state statutes, such as student records, psychological profiles, and interoffice communications.
Release of this kind of information, he argued in a legal brief filed last month, would hinder school officials' ability to investigate child-molestation charges because witnesses would be less likely to testify for the public record.
The Washington Education Association, which has intervened in the suit on the superintendent's side, contends that teachers falsely accused of molestation are also included in the files, and that release of such information without due process could be seriously damaging.
This year, the wea lobbied for a bill that would have restricted access to school employees' disciplinary records, says Robert D. Fisher, the union's legislative liaison.
The bill died, however, after a series of amendments to stiffen penalties for child molestation were proposed. Last month, the legislature adopted a bill that would bar from public-school teaching anyone convicted of killing, injuring, or sexually assaulting a minor.
Lawyers on both sides of the Washington case say they will appeal to the state supreme court if the appeals-court verdict is not in their favor.
In Connecticut, open-records advocates say their experience suggests that state high courts, whose justices often have a political background, may not always be sympathetic to open-access issues.
"Our supreme court is psychopathically opposed to freedom of information," charges Chris Powell, managing editor of the Journal Inquirer of Manchester, which has been fighting for years to gain access to personnel records of local school-district administrators.
Last month, the Connecticut Supreme Court refused to rule on a lower-court order in the case that would have required school officials to publicly disclose job-performance records of teachers.
The judges instead asked the state's Freedom of Information Commission--an independent, five-member panel representing citizens' access interests--to reconsider the facts of the six-year-old suit in light of a 1984 statute exempting teacher evaluations and records from Connecticut's access requirement.
Although many states have agencies that handle freedom-of-information complaints, Connecticut's commission is the only one with the authority to mediate complaints and represent citizens in court.
Mitchell W. Pearlman, executive director and general counsel for the commission, said the supreme court's action probably would force the newspaper to drop its request, because pursuing the dispute could take another six years.
The newspapers first requested the documents from the Somers School District in 1983, after a citizens' group complained that the district administration was top-heavy.
The newspaper has contended that knowing the basis on which the administrative promotions were made is an accountability issue, and lower-court judges agreed that the records should be made public.
But the high court concluded that the commission, in its initial finding, had not adequately weighed the balance between privacy interests and the public's right to know.
Mr. Powell of the Journal Inquirer complains that the 1984 law has been applied retroactively. But the high-court judges said in their opinion that the law merely clarified what was already legal intent--to close the records to the public.
The newspaper editor charges that the exemptions for teachers were not legal clarifications, but the result of "powerful lobbying" by the Connecticut Education Association.
Teachers' unions are not always on the side of nondisclosure, however.
In Colorado, the state affiliate of the National Education Association last week said it planned to file suit in the second round of a legal battle over a list of minority teachers employed by the Denver Public Schools.
Both the Denver Classroom Teachers Association and the Colorado Education Association have sought to obtain the list, whose existence has become the subject of heated debate in the city. The unions want it, officials say, as a means of alerting minority teachers to special programs, such as training for administrative positions.
But district officials have denied in court that such a list exists. Last month, in fact, a state court of appeals upheld a district court's decision that the school system could not be forced to disclose a "non-existent" list.
The Rocky Mountain News, however, has reported that it was able to obtain a copy of a list of minority school employees--and that sources within the school system maintain such a list was available in 1987.
Jan Erskine, the Denver union's president, charges that the district also has a list specifically of teachers "with their ethnicity identified."
"The district just does not want to be cooperative," she says. "They want to maintain an adversarial relationship with the unions."
According to Marti Houser, chief attorney for the Colorado Education Association, the unions have obtained a list of black teachers from an unnamed source but still need a list of other minorities.
"It defeats the purpose of open-records laws if your request for information is blocked because you haven't used exactly the right buzzword," Ms. Houser says.
Ms. Erskine maintains that the union should have special access to such records. "We're not just anyone off the street asking for information," she points out.
According to a spokesman for the district, officials had sought not to infringe on employees' privacy rights. Colorado laws exempt most school personnel files from the public record.
Mr. Pearlman of the Connecticut freedom-of-information commission suggests that legislative attempts to weaken open-records laws with exemptions for school employees may be part of the cyclical move toward nondisclosure that has followed the public-right-to-know high of the Watergate era.
But such statutes, he insists, are an example of "what is bad for education in this country."
Others note that the continuing drive toward professionalization of teaching will more than likely harden the divided positions on the issue of records disclosure, as teachers trade greater certification rigor and accountability standards for more pay and autonomy.
Against this backdrop, Ms. Tibor in North Dakota may represent the public's determination to keep its own watchful eye on teaching standards.
"You can't trust a lot of school boards to keep watch," says Ms. Tibor, who has finally obtained at least some of the information she sought but has paid a heavy price in legal fees and time away from her family for the victory. "Only about 1 percent are incompetent, but you've got to be able to watch that 1 percent."

NY Times Says That Mike Mulgrew Is A Hero - What Are They Thinking?

  Ms. Santos gets it wrong when she says that Mike Mulgrew has "bolstered his profile" among UFT members. Nothing is farther from the truth. No teacher or member of the UFT believes he negotiates in good faith, and no one believes he should continue as President.

 Betsy Combier

 With Release of Teacher Data, Setback for Union Turns Into a Rallying Cry

Alison Epstein, 44, a teacher at Chelsea Prep and a former teacher at the Special Music School on the Upper West Side, received top marks in the recently released teacher rankings.

By FERNANDA SANTOS and ANNA M. PHILLIPS, NY TIMES, Published: February 26, 2012
LINK
In the days leading up to the release of ratings for thousands of New York City public-school teachers on Friday, hundreds of e-mails poured into the in-box of Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers.
 “Enough of cooperation,” one member of the union wrote to his leader. Others prodded Mr. Mulgrew to stand up against Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, describing him as “untrustworthy,” in what he said was a call to arms of unparalleled intensity.
“How many times do we have to get kicked in the teeth before we realize we can’t work with these people?” John Elfrank-Dana, a union chapter leader at Murry Bergtraum High School in Lower Manhattan, asked during an interview, echoing what many of his fellow teachers have said in recent days on Twitter and on various blogs.
Mr. Mulgrew and his comrades had fought for more than a year to block release of the ratings, known as teacher data reports, which try to calculate how much value individual teachers add by predicting their students’ test scores and then measuring how much they exceed or fall short of those expectations. But the legal defeat a court dealt the union, by green-lighting the release, may yet be a political victory for the union — by galvanizing members and mobilizing allies on the left, including the Occupy movement and Change.org, through which scores of people signed petitions and sent letters to news organizations last week protesting the publication of the ratings.
“There’s brinkmanship from all sides, but from a political standpoint, Mulgrew is certainly the strongman, even if, from a legal standpoint, it’s City Hall that has the upper hand,” said David C. Bloomfield, a professor of education at Brooklyn College.
Mr. Mulgrew, who has spent the past three years building a case against Mr. Bloomberg’s education agenda of closing failing schools and promoting charters, sensed the opportunity.
“What I’m going to do now,” he said in an interview over the weekend, “is to stop the mayor from doing any further damage to the children of New York City.”
The posture has its risks: there is a lot of money at stake, for the city and for teachers. The Bloomberg administration and Mr. Mulgrew’s union are in the midst of negotiating the details of a state-mandated overhaul of teacher evaluations that would use the state test scores on which the controversial rankings are based, as well as subjective measures and possibly other exams. If they fail to come to an agreement by January, the city stands to lose some $200 million in state education aid, under a plan concocted by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to compel a compromise.
Already, whatever last bit of hope City Hall had of striking a deal on a new teachers’ contract before the end of Mr. Bloomberg’s term has all but evaporated, with Mr. Mulgrew focused instead on who might replace the mayor after the 2013 election.
The data reports, and the larger issue of teacher evaluations, could well become a litmus test for the Democrats already fighting for the union’s crucial endorsement.
Some of them rushed to condemn the rankings’ release on Friday, though in different ways.
Bill de Blasio, the public advocate, mimicked the union’s line of criticism, saying, “The mayor’s persistence in denigrating teachers is completely at odds with our need to move New York City forward by attracting the best and brightest to the profession.” Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, on the other hand, focused her fire on the courts, for siding against the union in its suit to block the release.
By positioning himself as the unbendable leader of the aggrieved, Mr. Mulgrew has at once bolstered his profile among the union’s rank and file and backed himself into a corner. One way or another, the state must put in place a system to judge the quality of its teachers and principals, as required by legislation passed in 2010 as part of its successful application for $700 million in federal education aid through the Race to the Top program. The alternative would be to forfeit it, a path Mr. Cuomo has already said he will not accept.
Mr. Bloomberg has given no indication that he is willing to budge on his plan to close and reopen 33 struggling schools so the city can dismiss half of their teachers. The plan is an effort to restore federal improvement grants suspended because of the lack of an agreement on the evaluation system.
Trying to capitalize on the attention and momentum that built over the data reports last week, the union plans to rebroadcast a television advertisement starting on Monday that first was shown earlier this month. In it, Mr. Mulgrew looks into the camera and says, “Work with us for better schools and a brighter future for all our students.”
Though many critics last week assailed The New York Times and other news organizations for publishing the ratings, the union has made the mayor its primary target, mostly shrugging off the role of the news media. That is a contrast to the union’s counterpart in Los Angeles, which picketed outside the Los Angeles Times building after the newspaper published teachers’ names and ratings in 2010.
The circumstances were different in Los Angeles — the newspaper had hired its own statistician to devise the rankings, while in New York, the city itself had compiled them and used them in tenure and other decisions. But the political lessons may be transferable.
While the Los Angeles Unified School District now produces its own teacher rankings, it has declined to release them with teachers’ names attached, citing potential harm to school employees. And the union has steadfastly declined to agree to using so-called value-added scores as a factor in a new evaluation system.
In New York, the state’s new evaluation system would use similar measures to calculate at least 20 percent of a teacher’s score; it took more than a year of fighting in court and at the negotiating table for state officials and union leaders to agree on the value-added weight. Mr. Cuomo had to intervene, and he ended up drafting Mr. Mulgrew to help bridge the differences between both sides.
When the deal was announced in Albany on Feb. 16, praise for Mr. Cuomo came from all corners, including Mr. Mulgrew and some of the same mayoral hopefuls who are now criticizing the rankings’ release.
Now, amid the controversy of last week, more questions are stirring about the reliability of the new system, which was written into Mr. Cuomo’s budget but still has to be signed into law.
Merryl H. Tisch, chancellor of the Board of Regents, said publication made it “more complicated to go back and negotiate at the local level,” a requirement for the new system’s adoption statewide. Mr. Mulgrew’s predecessor, Randi Weingarten, who is now president of the American Federation of Teachers, said it “couldn’t have come at a worse time.”
The outcome largely depends on Mr. Mulgrew’s next move. He will have to either figure out a way to justify his support for the new system to the union’s angry membership, or withdraw it.
Natalie Guandique, 27, received one of the highest cumulative teacher rankings for her  work with special-education students in the Bronx.

After Release of Ratings, a Focus on ‘Top’ Teachers




One was a scion of the family behind the celebrated Italian bakery, Arthur Avenue Bread, and has since been promoted to assistant principal.
Another, a San Francisco transplant, was in her first job at the front of a classroom and insisted that her special-education students at Public School 49 in the Bronx be held to the highest standards.
A third said she benefited from the small class sizes at the tiny Special Music School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan: never more than 17 fifth graders, so she could group them by skill level in English and math and work closely with each student.
In the days leading up to the release on Friday of the city’s Teacher Data Reports, which are an effort to assess how much individuals added to the progress of students in their charge, many critics worried about the shame and humiliation low-scoring teachers would be subjected to, especially given the ratings’ wide margins of error. But the ratings also shined a spotlight on the educators who, at least by this measure, were best able to help their students post gains on the state’s standardized tests.
The rankings were based on a complex formula that took into account demographics and past test results to predict student performance, then credited or blamed teachers for the difference between the projections and the actual performance.
The most recent set of data included 17,800 reports for the 2009-10 school year, covering about 12,000 teachers. The specific rankings were not definitive, but in general, the teachers at the top of the list — the three mentioned above were among the highest ranked — would be near the top even if the error margin had been considered.
Of the top 25 teachers with at least three years’ experience, 12 taught in Queens and seven in Brooklyn. Many of the top few hundred were female, young and toiling in the city’s neighborhood schools. Some worked in programs for the gifted and talented, others with special-needs students.
Though many were unknown, until now, outside their school hallways, Malvola Lewis had been praised in 2010 by Joel I. Klein, then the schools chancellor, after returning to her old neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and what Mr. Klein called “a hard-to-staff school,” P.S. 40.
Another top-rated teacher, Rebecca Victoros, was credited for working with her students at P.S. 122 in Astoria, Queens, to help pass a 2009 city law to reduce bus engine idling in front of schools.
And then there was Linda Lerner, who not only excelled in the data-based rating system but also inspired a charming tribute in the school newspaper at P.S. 270 in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn: “I held out my one dollar bill,” wrote one of her students, “and told Ms. Lerner she was worth one million dollars and that I would pay her the other $999,999.00 later.”
The teacher who received the highest rating in any single year was Walter Galiano Jr., the son and grandson of the famous Bronx bakers. He taught for nearly a decade at P.S. 205, near the Bronx Zoo, and was promoted in 2010 to assistant principal of P.S. 69 in the Bronx’s Soundview neighborhood after training with the New York City Leadership Academy, a nonprofit organization that grooms school leaders.
Mr. Galiano was traveling in Italy this weekend, but his older brother, Jerry, said, “For him, it’s a validation of all the hard work that he’s done.”
Natalie Guandique, 27, the special-education teacher in the Bronx, has also left the classroom and is now finishing a master’s program at Teachers College at Columbia University. She attributed much of her success to having high expectations for her special-education students at P.S. 49.
“I came in and said, ‘They will learn this,’ ” Ms. Guandique said. “It may take us a longer time and we may have to take a different path, but they will learn what the other students are learning.”
So when the school’s other fifth-grade classes were learning to craft five-paragraph essays, so were Ms. Guandique’s students, though they had to start with a single paragraph. She said she spent hours planning her lessons, often coming up with a half-dozen ways to explain a concept — say, reducing fractions — to reach students with learning disabilities and other challenges. Some days, she had to devote an entire morning to one concept.
Her students made so much progress on state exams that the principal of P.S. 49 held them up as a model. But Ms. Guandique said test scores meant only so much.
“A test is one glimpse into the skills they’ve acquired,” she said. “If they do poorly, it doesn’t mean they don’t know.”
At P.S. 859, the Special Music School, Alison Epstein, 44, said she focused on the individual skills and needs of each student. “It’s definitely a benefit to have a smaller classroom, because you can differentiate so much easier,” she said.
Ms. Epstein said that instead of teaching to the test, she looked for ways to impart skills in a fun, hands-on manner. For example, to practice comparing and contrasting, she had students read an article about a Pakistani girl’s daily routine, then write essays comparing their lives with hers.
But Ms. Epstein, who now teaches a second-grade gifted and talented class at P.S. 33 in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, is not a big fan of the ratings system in which she excelled. She cautioned against penalizing teachers whose students did poorly on state exams, saying there were too many variables, from having supportive parents at home to being able to focus and read instructions carefully on test day.
“Unfortunately, the schools have become incredibly data-driven, which at times detracts from the overall curriculum,” Ms. Epstein said. “The pressure for teachers and children to perform for tests that do not really show how intelligent a student is, or how amazing a teacher might be, is substantial.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.