Attempts to measure and judge teachers by student standardized test scores continue to be fraught with errors, reports the Dec. 26 New York Times.

The full article, by Sharon Otterman, can be found here: Hurdles Emerge in Rising Effort to Rate Teachers.

Excerpt: 

For the past three years, Katie Ward and Melanie McIver have worked as a team at Public School 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, teaching a fourth-grade class. But on the reports that rank the city’s teachers based on their students’ standardized test scores, Ms. Ward’s name is nowhere to be found.

“I feel as though I don’t exist,” she said last Monday, looking up from playing a vocabulary game with her students.

Down the hall, Deirdre Corcoran, a fifth-grade teacher, received a ranking for a year when she was out on child-care leave. In three other classrooms at this highly ranked school, fourth-grade teachers were ranked among the worst in the city at teaching math, even though their students’ average score on the state math exam was close to four, the highest score.

“If I thought they gave accurate information, I would take them more seriously,” the principal of P.S. 321, Elizabeth Phillips, said about the rankings. “But some of my best teachers have the absolute worst scores,” she said, adding that she had based her assessment of those teachers on “classroom observations, talking to the children and the number of parents begging me to put their kids in their classes.”

It is becoming common practice nationally to rank teachers for their effectiveness, or value added, a measure that is defined as how much a teacher contributes to student progress on standardized tests. The practice was strongly supported by President Obama’s education grant competition, Race to the Top, and large school districts, including those in Houston, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis and Washington, have begun to use a form of it.

But the experience in New York City shows just how difficult it can be to come up with a system that gains acceptance as being fair and accurate. The rankings are based on an algorithm that few other than statisticians can understand, and on tests that the state has said were too narrow and predictable. Most teachers’ scores fall somewhere in a wide range, with perfection statistically impossible. And the system has also suffered from the everyday problems inherent in managing busy urban schools, like the challenge of using old files and computer databases to ensure that the right teachers are matched to the right students.

All of this was not as important when the teacher rankings were an internal matter that principals could choose to heed or ignore. City officials had pledged to the teachers’ union that the rankings would not be used in the evaluation of teachers and that they would resist releasing them to the public.

But over the past several months, the system of teacher rankings has been catapulted to one of the most contentious issues facing the city’s 80,000-member teaching force. A new state law, passed this year to help New York win Race to the Top money, pledges that by 2013, 25 percent of a teacher’s evaluation be based on a value-added system. The city has begun urging principals to consider rankings when deciding whether to grant tenure. And the city now supports the release of the data to the 12 media organizations, including The New York Times, that have requested it.

The departing schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, defended the release of the rankings in an e-mail to school staff members, acknowledging that they had limitations but calling them “the fairest systemwide way we have to assess the real impact of teachers on student learning.”(continued here.)

Hopefully the New York Times will heed its own reporters and not follow the shameful lead of the L.A. Times, which published the names of thousands of Los Angeles Public Schools teachers it had ranked using an algorithm it had created (with $15,000 in backing from the Gates-funded Hechinger Report).

This nonscientific teacher-ranking witch hunt  proved to be fatally inaccurate in at least one instance, when  Rigoberto Ruelas, a beloved and valued teacher at Miramonte Elementary in South Los Angeles, was given a low ranking by the L.A. Times, and committed suicide shortly thereafter.

(See: “Does the L.A. Times have blood on its hands?” and “Enough is Enough L.A. Times, NBC, Arne Duncan, Eli Broad, Bill Gates…”)

Family members says Ruelas cited the publicly humiliating and personally devastating L.A. Times judgment of his professionalism as one of the issues that plagued him in his final days.

Both the L.A. Times’ “report” and the death of Rigoberto Ruelas rank among the low points in the national education news of 2010.

— sue p.