Things rank and gross in nature

Congratulations, media! You have put the last nail in the education coffin. By forcing New York City to release  the results of its “value-added” evaluations of teachers, you have now guaranteed that corruption and inferiority will reign in New York City schools.

According to one news report, the city gave lip service to not wishing to release the results to the public, but secretly told reporters to file Freedom of Information Act demands to get the statistics out for all to see. Sweethearts in immorality, all. And now, on the other end of this mess, one laughs reading how Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky and Bill Gates cried out against the release of the data and the dangers of viewing it in isolation.

These algorithmically calculated rankings of teachers based on student progress on standardized examinations from 2007 to 2010 were supposed to be experimental. That meant that more than 18,000 teachers in more than 30 schools were picked for evaluation to see if this process was usable, reliable and meaningful. Why would any organization release data from an experimental study before all the kinks were worked out? Why would the media want this stuff?

The pilot’s results have a 35- to 53-percentile margin of error. How embarrassing! One example of this is found in studying the results for a teacher of a fifth-grade gifted and talented class. She was given a rating in the 16th percentile because her bright kids’ math scores dipped from 4.14 in 2007-2008 to 4.08 in 2008-2009. Isn’t this the equivalent of going from 91 percent to 90 percent or such? The students were bright and wonderful both years. The teacher flunked. Is something wrong with her skills or the accuracy of the model used? 

Ranking teachers based upon student progress is still very controversial. “Value-added” is a catch phrase trickling down and is the mantra of robot-like educational administrators. However, I understand how this issue played out. We did it for money.