The city teachers union lost yet another bid to block the Department of Education from letting the public know how classroom teachers are performing — leaving the union with just one last legal lifeline.
The Appellate Division of the Supreme Court’s dismissal of the request for appeal marks the third major legal setback for the union since it filed a lawsuit last year challenging the city’s right to release the ratings.
The Post filed a Freedom of Information Law request for the teacher performance rankings last summer, as did a number of other media groups.
The United Federation of Teachers now has just one longshot legal option — an appeal to the state’s highest court to take on the case.
“Given the harm that could be done by the release of these misleading and inaccurate reports, we will be filing a motion directly with the New York State Court of Appeals seeking leave to appeal the Appellate Division’s decision in this case,” said UFT president Michael Mulgrew.
Since filing the lawsuit over a year ago, the union has argued that making the ratings for roughly 12,000 teachers of grades four to eight publicly available would violate their privacy.
The union also argued that the release would wrongly harm reputations because the ratings were based on a flawed formula for measuring how much students improve on state math and reading tests from year to year.
City Law Department officials have countered that the case centers on the right of the public to access the performance ratings of city workers — a right that experts have agreed is covered by the Freedom of Information Law.
Robert Freeman, executive director of the state’s Committee on Open Government, told The Post when the case was first argued that the teacher-performance data didn’t fall under any allowable exceptions to FOIL.
“The kind of document that we’re talking about involves determinations concerning public employees’ performance,” he said at the time. “We have advised in many contexts over the years that those kinds of determinations are indeed public.”
So far two courts have agreed with him — and in the case of the appellate court, twice.
The city’s Law Department declined comment yesterday.
Since the case was filed, the Department of Education has decided to stop using its disputed calculation of teachers’ performance because the state is planning to introduce its own system for rating teachers by the end of the school year.