Mike Klonsky. The use and misuse of data to beat up on neighborhood schools, principals and teachers.

– Brother Mike breaks a story. There is no shortage of examples of the use and misuse of data to beat up on neighborhood schools, principals and teachers. But this one is pretty slimy. A must read.

Are Prosser teachers ‘gaming the system’? Or is this reporter gaming them?

“If anyone out there has been in Prosser for more than a second, they would see that you can’t make a Prosser teacher do anything they don’t believe in.” — Prosser teacher Maria Magdalena

After reading Ted Cox’s piece (Prosser Staff ‘Gamed’ CPS Survey, Gave H.S. Leaders Inflated Marks: Sources) in DNAinfo yesterday, I had to use breathe-in, breathe-out techniques for anger management.

For one thing, I love Prosser Career Academy, where I used to coach basketball. Despite its relatively high achievement record and talented (CTU members) faculty and staff, the school, like so many others in Chicago, has become the target of privateers. The neighborhood has a burgeoning Hispanic population and the city’s charter operators see it as a potential market and prime territory for expansion. There’s even a new privately-run Noble charter school now under construction right across the street from Prosser, despite protests from parents and community residents. Freshman students at Prosser have told me that they’ve been receiving phone calls at home from charter people, trying to recruit them away from Prosser.

I hate to see teachers or principals unfairly debased or accused of high crimes and misdemeanors in the media and left with no voice in their own defense. That’s exactly how I felt after reading Cox’s piece. It wasn’t just that he was surmising what teachers probably would do if confronted with a high-stakes survey. We can all do that. He was actually making accusations which could lead to charges of unethical behavior.

Using only hearsay and unnamed sources and without one piece of evidence, Cox claims Prosser teachers were intentionally lying and manipulating one of Byrd-Bennett’s “surveys” to make their supposedly bad school look good and doing so at the direction of principal Ken Hunter (now on medical leave).

Ironically, the only source named in Cox’s article is Carol Caref, a CTU research consultant, who Cox says, “confirmed ‘teachers reporting that they were told in meetings that, if they didn’t want their school to be downgraded, they should fill out this survey in a positive way.'”

Read the entire post here.