Leonie Haimson, leader of Class Size Matters and Student Privacy Matters, maintains a terrific, informative blog for Néw York City and state issues called nyceducationnews@yahoogroups.com. Here she comments on the release of NYC teacher ratings based on state test scores. The bottom line in some of the reports shown below is that low test scores are caused by bad teachers, who are obviously ineffective. If every school had only “great” teachers, every student would have high scores. If only.
Leonie writes:
“8.2% of NYC teachers rated ineffective or developing, compared to 2.4% in the rest of state; meanwhile only 9.2% rated highly effective in NYC compared to 58.2% statewide.
“Tisch [chair of state Board of Regents] etc. say rest of state figures should be more like NYC, and call for re-design of system.
“Meanwhile Daily News editors — as dumb as ever — say NYC’s results don’t find enough ineffective teachers, considering “The results are absurd when roughly a third of city students pass state English and math tests.”
“They want the state to take away power of districts to design their own systems, fire teachers who are rated ineffective for 2 years in a row, and take more power away from principals to rate teachers highly whose students don’t score well on tests.
The New York Daily News editorial recommends:
One: Empower state, not local, officials to set the grades that will label teachers ineffective, developing, effective or highly effective.
Two: Get local districts out of the business of rating teachers using measures that are designed to boost subpar performers.
Three: Put teachers who are rated ineffective for two consecutive years in fire-at-will probationary status, rather than giving them access to hopelessly bureaucratic hearings.
Four: Ensure that a teacher whose students bomb tests cannot vault into a top rating because, for example, a principal gives a high mark for lesson planning.
Speaking of tests, improving education in New York will be one of the biggest Cuomo faces.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/editorial-cuomo-big-teacher-test-article-1.2047673
[My note:] What the Daily News wants is to eliminate due process (“hopelessly bureaucratic hearings”) so that teachers can be swiftly fired if scores don’t go up.
More reporting on the evaluations:
Chalkbeat,
New York Post,
New York Times,
New York Daily News,
Capital New York (Pro),
Wall Street Journal,
NY1
Summary here:
by Jessica Bakeman, Eliza Shapiro and Conor Skelding
EVALS AS EVIDENCE—Education leaders use NYC scores as grist for statewide changes—Capital’s Jessica Bakeman and Eliza Shapiro: New York City’s evaluation of its teachers’ performance, which resulted in only 9 percent earning the highest scores under the state-mandated rating system, is more reliable than other districts’ and underscores the need for changes to ensure results aren’t artificially high, education leaders argued on Tuesday. In the rest of the state, 58 percent of teachers were rated “highly effective,” according to preliminary data released on Tuesday. That statistic is considered suspect, especially given students’ low scores on state exams, according to Board of Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch, outgoing education commissioner John King and education groups that have supported strict accountability measures for teachers and schools.
“There’s a real contrast between how our students are performing and how their teachers and principals are evaluated,” Tisch said in a statement. “The ratings from districts aren’t differentiating performance. We look forward to working with the Governor, Legislature, NYSUT, and other education stakeholders to strengthen the evaluation law in the coming legislative session.”
The education department report includes recommendations for how to improve the system. For example, if more than 75 percent of teachers or principals are rated “highly effective” or fewer than 5 percent are rated “ineffective” on the component of the evaluation system that is based on observations, the lead evaluators in that district should be retrained and an independent audit might be appropriate, the department recommended. [PRO] http://bit.ly/1sByLgW
—Despite the overall high scores, New York State United Teachers is calling into question the validity of the results. “On the whole, they may be spot on,” NYSUT president Karen Magee told Gannett’s Jon Campbell. “But for individual teachers, they can be spectacularly wrong—and that undermines confidence in the whole system.” http://bit.ly/1BTUPTW
—At least 100 educators in Buffalo were erroneously rated “effective” or “highly effective” when their scores should have been lower, prompting a state probe. Buffalo News’ Sandra Tan: http://bit.ly/1sCuKZD
_
__,_._,___
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Tisch & Cuomo don’t care how arbitrary this whole thing is!!
The fact is NY is one of two states which received 700 million dollars in RttT money – the highest amount in entire country.
All (reformers) eyes are on them .
They DO NOT represent the people of NY state. Never have. Never will.
BAD TESTS cannot be used to prove anything. We do not need Pearson test writers policing our profession!
Cuomo wants to break the teacher’s union in NY state ahead of NJ & CT so he can strut his tough stuff for the boys financing his political career.
All a part of their overall plan to eliminate career educators once and for all. No one in their right mind will pay $100,000 or more for a bachelor’s degree to make 30,000 dollars per year…and, oh yes, let’s not forget face the stress of being fired every 2 years for variables beyond their control.
Are these people really as stupid as they sound? Individuals who are charged with oversight of the state’s education system really should be familiar with the research that calls into question student test scores being used to evaluate teachers. Supposed journalists parroting the party line rather than engaging in investigative reporting are a disgrace to their profession or what is left of it.
” Individuals who are charged with oversight of the state’s education system really should be familiar with the research that calls into question student test scores being used to evaluate teachers.”
Well the only research that those individuals need to read and understand is Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
I think the new teacher evaluation system is just another part of their plan to eliminate teaching as a career profession. When your evaluation is tied to variables that you as a teacher have no control over, fewer and fewer and fewer young people will study teaching in college. No one can take the gamble of investing over 100,000 dollars into a bachelor’s degree to make 30,000 dollars your first year. Many states are already doing away with minimum salaries and pay schedules. Who in their right mind would train for a career where you are 99% likely to become poor? ….and, oh yes,….be in high jeopardy of losing your teaching job within the first three years! It’s all crazy! I would never allow my children to become teachers, and I am very, very honest with my students. I would die if they walked into this buzz saw!
Evaluation “reform” will continue until we prove bad teachers are the problem…
I was rated highly effective by my AP, after all my observations were completed in the 2012-2013 school year.
Due to the new teacher evaluation system, my overall rating was downgraded to “effective”, as I was later to learn via my DOE email at the beginning of this 2013-14 school year. An evaluation system that puts me at the mercy of other teacher’s “performance”, in different subject areas, with different classes of varying socio-economic and behavioral backgrounds.
I worked very, very hard to achieve a highly effective status. I always do. Being downgraded and then seeing criticism of NYC’s low percentage of teachers in that category is beyond insulting. It’s absurd. Meaningless. It’s like hitting a 485 foot home run to dead away center field and having it ruled a foul ball.
They want us to fail. It’s as simple as that. They’re not stupid at all. They want us to fail.
Where the hell does the New York Daily News get off on telling the professionals of any profession how the profession should be run?????