Why I'm glad the DOE released the TDR's

There is some good that comes from releasing the ridiculously flawed teacher data reports.  It truly illustrates to people who can see through them that they are poorly created and not that meticulous.

Here are a bunch of questions that the release of the TDR's raise that the DOE and Bloomberg will never be able to answer, but the public will answer for them in the form of public outrage or through lawsuits that cost the city more tax-payer dollars.

• How do you put a clearly flawed report that may incorporate real students, but haven't actually measured anything in connection with their actual teachers?
• How do you create a report that not only paints a negative picture of public servants, who need open public support, but doesn't even tell the reader anything true about who they teach and what they teach?
• How do tax-payers tolerate the spending of money on a department of education that finds that it is necessary to pay people to tell lies about honest workers?
• Where's the department of education's accountability?
• When will Bloomberg hold himself accountable for their failures?
• How does the city benefit from the release of such flawed reports that cost the city money, would ostracize promising educators away from high-need areas, and would increase attrition when it is the leading reason for inconsistent classroom conditions?

I find that it serves a greater good to show how mismanaged the DOE is to release such reports and have no remedy for improprieties in data.  It serves a greater purpose, though at the expense of innocent teachers, to show the public how their tax dollars are wasted on finding ways to vilify public school teachers.

If people are truly interested in saving the city money, don't cut on the classroom level.  Cut at the management level that led to this embarrassing showcase of incompetence.  What the hell are these people doing in Tweed?  They look at a bunch of spreadsheets and assume that anything in their little boxes are facts or statistical truths when rosters change so often that they're pinning the failures of others on innocent people.

Jumping to the conclusion that the DOE knows how to evaluate teachers through data requires that the DOE actually knows how to effectively track students (and teachers, for that matter) on a regular basis, which doesn't appear to be the case.

So Thanks, DOE.  You've given us the necessary argument to show the world that the leadership of Bloomberg and Klein or Bloomberg and Black are ineffective and disconnected from the real needs of high-need classrooms.