Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
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 WINNIE HU and ROBERT GEBELOFF
Published: February 26, 2012
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.”
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