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The New Republic: Keep teacher data private
- 01-24-2011
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Opinion by Seyward Darby/NPR
Seyward Darby is a deputy online editor at The New Republic.
On Wednesday, Slate ran an article defending several media outlets in New York that want to publish, with the support of Mayor Bloomberg's education department, value-added assessment data of the city's teachers. The outlets would be following the lead of the Los Angeles Times, which published such data last year. As Slate notes, this "data ranks fourth through eighth grade math and English teachers, purportedly based on how much progress their students have made on standardized tests from year to year." Value-added is a controversial way of evaluating teachers because the results are just estimations; in reality, a teacher's rank falls within a percentile range that is often very large. Slate notes that, according to a study by the Annenberg Institute at Brown, an "average teacher — say, one who should fall in the 63rd percentile based on three years of performance — might actually show up anywhere between the 46th and the 80th percentile." That's a wide margin, particularly to the teacher in question. (more…)
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