This past week, the New York City Education Department released teachers’ individual performance ratings. The released information included teachers’ names and schools so anyone could look up a specific teacher’s evaluation. It is ironic, then, that the NYC Education Department “admonished” the media not to “use the scores to label or pillory teachers.” However, given the recent trend to blame teachers (and teachers alone) for the failures in our education system, how could the media, parents, and other stakeholders do anything with this information except what the NYC Education Department allegedly did not intend?
For me, the NYT article highlights many of the problems that exist in current teacher evaluation systems. The ratings published in NYC were based on students’ gains on the state’s math and English exams over the past five years. However, the margin of error for student gains was as high as 53 percentage points (in English). The article also mentioned that for some teachers, they were evaluated based on the achievement of as few as 10 students. With so much error in student gains, it seems almost ridiculous that this information would serve any constructive purpose.
As much as sources in the article insist that these rankings will not be used to judge teachers in isolation, unfortunately not everyone will consider the data’s margin of error or the possibility of bias when they read these rankings. In my opinion, if school districts are going to publish teacher evaluations at all, at least it should be accurate, reliable, and fair. This means that most school districts should rethink how they evaluate teachers before announcing these evaluations to the public.
You can find the NYT article at the following URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/02/24/teacher-data-reports-are-released
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1 comment:
Lauren,
I think you raise some great points in your post. While I feel that knowing the evaluations of teachers has value for parents in theory, the implementation in New York schools is clearly insufficient. I've found that even educated people frequently misunderstand the statistical implications of small sample sizes and draw unfounded conclusions from such data.
I want to play devil's advocate for a minute though. Since the increasingly popular view of teaching is that it is less of a stochastic process than we might have once thought, what need is there for a large data set? This is especially true if a teacher's assessment is made on the improvement in their students' scores rather than their absolute achievement.
I am uncomfortable with that kind of reasoning because it seems so counter to the experiences I have had in the classroom. But school districts and organizations like TFA are increasingly embracing this attitude. As teachers, I think we need to argue our case that it is unfair to hold us solely accountable for the educational outcomes of our students. Unfortunately, the current fixation on objective assessments of performance allows for few other conclusions. We need to push for better holistic assessments of teaching ability and the impact of that ability as a component of student success.
-Summer
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