By Fernanda Santos and Sharon Otterman
7:17 p.m. | Updated After a long legal battle and amid much anguish by teachers and other educators, the New York City Education Department released individual performance rankings of 18,000 public school teachers on Friday, while admonishing the news media not to use the scores to label or pillory teachers.
The reports, which name teachers as well as their schools, rank teachers based on their students’ gains on the state’s math and English exams over five years and up until the 2009-10 school year. The city released the reports after the United Federation of Teachers exhausted all legal remedies to block their public disclosure.
The reports are now available on SchoolBook, posted on the individual pages for the elementary and middle schools whose teachers’ ratings were released. You can search for a school by using the search module on the left.
At a briefing on Friday morning, an Education Department official said that over the five years, 521 teachers were rated in the bottom 5 percent for two or more years, and 696 were repeatedly in the top 5 percent.
But citing both the wide margin of error — on average, a teacher’s math score could be 35 percentage points off, or 53 points on the English exam — as well as the limited sample size — some teachers are being judged on as few as 10 students — city education officials said their confidence in the data varied widely from case to case.
“The purpose of these reports is not to look at any individual score in isolation ever,” said the Education Department’s chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky. “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.”
Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott also underscored the need to use the individual rankings cautiously.
“I don’t want our teachers disparaged in any way, and I don’t want our teachers denigrated based on this information,” Mr. Walcott said. “This is very rich data that has evolved over the years. As Shael has indicated, it is old data and it’s just one piece of information. And so I don’t want our teachers characterized in a certain way based on this very complex rich tool that we have available to us.”
Nevertheless, the data is ripe for analysis. One fact shared by the Education Department: Many of the teachers included in the database are no longer working in city schools.
Officials said 77 percent of the 18,000 who received reports were still employed by the Education Department, but of those who remained, many had moved on to administrative jobs or teach subject areas or grade levels that were not included in the reports.
For example, the teacher who was rated most highly, based on his scores for the 2009-10 school year, is now an assistant principal at another school, according to his online profile. His rating encompassed only one year of data and was based on 32 students’ test scores.
The data was handed to the news media on CDs, which contain spreadsheets listing teachers’ scores for the 2007-08, 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years. Roughly 12,000 teachers were given teacher data reports each year.
Charter school and special education teachers were not included; the city says it will likely release their rankings on Tuesday.
The teacher rankings began as a pilot program four years ago to improve instruction in 140 city schools. It has turned into the most controversial set of public school statistics to be released by the Bloomberg administration: individual rankings for roughly 18,000 math and English public school teachers from fourth through eighth grades.
The teachers have already seen their reports, which have been distributed for the past several years. But parents and the rest of the public can now learn how individual teachers performed, based on how they improved their students’ test scores, and with that they will begin the difficult and emotional reckoning of comparing what they personally know about a teacher to what a set of statistics tells them.
In the larger picture, the ratings could bolster or undermine a school’s reputation, and validate or discredit convictions long espoused by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, like his belief that small schools are better than large ones and that length of service is not necessarily a predictor of strong performance in the classroom.
The rankings, known as teacher data reports, are supposed to rate teachers across a performance scale. They are at the core of a national effort to assess, compensate and dismiss teachers based in part on their students’ test results.
In some school districts, the rankings have become an important component in decision-making about teachers. New York City principals have been using the rankings to help make tenure decisions. Houston gave bonuses based on rankings, though the district eventually restructured that program. In the Washington school district, poorly rated teachers have lost their jobs.
New York has become only the second city in the country where teachers’ names and ratings have been publicized. In 2010, The Los Angeles Times published its own set of ratings, in spite of fierce opposition from the local teachers’ union. Thousands of people flocked to the newspaper’s Web site to check the rankings, though, and Arne Duncan, the United States education secretary, praised the effort, saying, “silence is not an option.”
Read the rest here.
If you enjoy the content at iBankCoin, please follow us on Twitter
