Grapple from the Apple

In a sane world, it would be the New York City United Federation of Teachers local that would be clamoring for the city to release the test score–based teacher ratings to the public, while the Department of Education would be begging to keep them a secret, because it only takes a glance at the numbers to see how stupid and unserious these numbers are, using the scores of tests that have been totally discredited in the first place, leaping all over the map for any individual teacher from year to year, and with incredible error margin spreads of 35 percentage points for the math scores and 53 (!) for English.

“No principal would ever make a decision on this score alone, and we would never invite anyone — parents, reporters, principals, teachers — to draw a conclusion based on this score alone,”

said Shael Polakow-Suransky of the DOE, trying to be reassuring, but why would they make any use of it at all? The numbers are basically arbitrary, and should not play any role in principals' decisions whatever. The fact that they have used them shows, really, what bad faith the mayor and his chancellors have been bringing to the table in this long debate.

Photo from Village Voice.

Also in a sane world, if the city's police force wants to investigate potential terrorists, instead of infiltrating Muslim student organizations all over New Jersey they could try infiltrating the FBI, because pretty much every terrorist plot they have uncovered over the past x many years has had an FBI informant right in the middle of it—doing practically all of the work, too. There's a pattern there.