Hugh Reilly: Don’t fall for name and shame game

IN NEW York, sales of tailored hair shirts and bespoke sackcloth suits spiked last week when the city’s education department released the identities of thousands of allegedly underperforming teachers.

As a consequence of comparing the test performances of students, teachers were rated as “ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective”.

To be fair, the decision to publically humiliate professional staff through media outlets such as the New York Times was taken somewhat reluctantly – the preferred option of placing classroom duds in the stocks and having them pelted with rotten fruit was dismissed after taking legal advice. The United Teachers Federation fought an 18-month campaign through the courts to prevent the content of the Teacher Data Reports being revealed, claiming that much of the research was unreliable. It has threatened to sue newspapers that publish erroneous information.

Just in case the core of the Big Apple’s shakers and movers missed the scourging of teachers in the New York Times, the story was carried by the Wall Street Journal (teachers were so bad, they shamed them twice). Doubtless, the bankers at JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs – who, like their UK counterparts, greatly value their privacy – tut-tutted at the incompetence of the public sector. The financial vultures in Lower Manhattan, who singlehandedly transformed the status of the USA from a global superpower to that of a payday-loan customer, fail to see the irony.

The sherricking given to New York’s not-finest teachers is peculiar when one considers the US to be the land of vacuous praise, a society that declares the most mundane act of a school pupil to be “awesome”. The mocking of pedagogues also flies in the face of President Obama’s “respect” policy. Call it idle speculation, but my best guess is that teachers will demand to know the names of the city’s worst police officers – that would put a new twist on the good cop/bad cop routine. Unfortunately, given the fact that New York’s police officers are heavily armed and, by dint of drugs busts, have access to mind-altering substances, I suspect that a short straw would be needed to acquire the signature of the council official who compiled such a roll of police dishonour.

Thanks to Hollywood, the problems of incompetent teaching in New York schools are easily solved. Michelle Pfeiffer’s career has taken something of a nosedive recently, so I’m certain she would be willing to reprise her role in the film Dangerous Minds, where she turns boys in da hood into Shakespeare junkies. Were he not dead, Glenn Ford, star of Blackboard Jungle, the genesis of the heroic-teacher-overcomes-adversity genre, would surely have chipped in to help New York children realise their potential. Hey, daddio, I’m going out on a limb here, but perhaps some of our soon-to-be redundant chartered teachers in Scotland may consider becoming mentors to Brooklyn dominies. Thought not.

Playing the blame game is an ideal distraction technique to take attention away from the disaster that is publically funded education in New York. The civil rights battle to desegregate education, fought in the Fifties by Forrest Gump and many others, may have been won but the war has been lost. In NYC, racially segregated housing has resulted in de facto educational apartheid. For example, schools in the Bronx with predominantly black or Latino students receive $11,000 per pupil. Unbelievably, in leafy Long Island, the figure is a staggering $22,000 per capita. Little wonder that, for most ethnic minority kids, the notion of equal access to educational opportunity is nothing more than a bad American dream.

In many New York schools, class sizes of 40 are commonplace. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a federal government initiative, is essentially a shaming ritual whereby schools deemed to be failing are denied funding.

I believe teachers in New York deserve our admiration, not our scorn. Undoubtedly, there will be some bad apples in the profession, but there are procedures to remove them from frontline teaching. Publishing the names of those who do not meet the criteria of bureaucrats is contemptible and serves only to increase the rancid outpourings of the US branch of the anti-teaching brigade.