In a complaint scheduled to be filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, StudentsFirstNY will ask the office to investigate the distribution of teacher quality in NYC schools. In January, StudentsFirstNY released a report that found only three percent of teachers were rated “unsatisfactory” last year and that those who received this rating worked disproportionately in schools with many poor and minority students. According to a recent article from Gotham Schools, the complaint asserts that the unequal distribution is the result of discriminatory city policies.
StudentsFirstNY Acting Executive Director Glen Weiner attended a protest outside the Department of Education’s headquarters at Tweed Courthouse and commented on teachers rated as "unsatisfactory" under the old evaluation system:
“The problem was that everybody is rated satisfactory. If you think about what it takes for a teacher to be rated unsatisfactory in the old model, it has to say something about those teachers”
