The New York Times, along with a few other media outlets, went to court to win the right to publish Teacher Data Reports–the “value-added” ratings for some 18,000 New York City public schoolteachers. The Times explains today–accurately–that the numbers are seriously flawed:
Even before their release, the ratings have been assailed by independent experts, school administrators and teachers who say there are large margins of error–because they are based on small amounts of data, the test scores themselves were determined by the state to have been inflated, and there were factual errors or omissions, among other problems.
So why publish them? The Times hasn’t adequately answered that question. On their SchoolBook blog, they offer a canned response: “With SchoolBook‘s partners at WNYC, the Times has developed a sophisticated tool to display the ratings in their proper context, a hallmark of our journalism.” And the Times points out that individual teachers will be able to post a response to their scores. I suppose that’s to be seen as magnanimous–some supposedly objective measure of your job performance is now public, but you can write a rebuttal.
The Los Angeles Times did something similar with teachers in that city. As Daniel Denvir pointed out in Extra! (4/11), that reporting was, like the testing data, seriously flawed–and it seemed to have been a factor in one teacher’s suicide. A New York Times spokesperson told Denvir, “Obtaining this data advances our ability to inform readers about the quality of teaching and the way schools measure quality.”
That’s confusing. If the test scores are unreliable, they tell you nothing about the “quality of teaching.” If the point is to demonstrate that these scores are highly flawed, and shouldn’t be used by the city to determine anything at all, then exposing those flaws is a worthy journalistic pursuit. And as Denvir points out in the Extra! piece, the Times‘ journalism on the problems of value-added testing has been pretty good overall.
But it’s still hard to understand why an outlet would make these scores public if it believes they are seriously flawed. The Times even published an op-ed by Bill Gates (2/23/12) arguing against publishing the information. The argument for publishing bad data–which will single out individuals by name, and falsely damage reputations–is still hard to figure out.
This is a serious mistake. As Gates points out, there is nothing to gain from shaming teachers. And who seriously believes teachers have much control over student’s test scores. Perhaps kindergarden teachers do, but once the kid is in 10th, 11th grade — if he/she’s had a decade of bad teachers the 11th teacher he/she receives isn’t going to magically make him/her a straight A student.
Learning is a slow process, and for teacher ratings it’s much like professional sports coaches. If you have smart kids or at least kids who have had good previous teachers (which you have no control over), you’ll look like a good teacher. This is similar to a MLB team — if the team has talented players, the coach will look good when they win 100 games. If his players suck, fans will blame the coach.
I’m guessing the NYT is publishing this because they were stupid and spent money suing for the information. It’s probably a financial decision — they want to draw some traffic for the money they paid their lawyers to sue for the documents.
This makes me glad I am not a teacher any longer. I am in favor of accountability, but really isn’t this the same place where bad teachers get paid not to teach?
Public school teachers are a prime target for these kinds of hatchet jobs because corporate media is rather solidly anti-union and largely supportive of the pro-privatization crowd. When you consider those biases, their reasons for publishing this bad data are not hard to figure out at all.
So, a teacher who works with at risk kids gets a lousy “grade,” while one that works with kids from upper middle class kids gets an “A.” I taught for thirty-one years and have had a few classes with kids that rarely came to class, hardly ever did homework, and disrespected school. It was MY fault they didn’t learn? I deserve public humiliation for their failure? According to conservatives, yes.
Can we publish the names of parents who never even bothered to come to a school function or show the slightest interest in their kids’ progress? Can we publish the names of kids who hardly bothered to crack a book, study for a test, or how many times they never even brought a pencil to class?
Moving right along, can we publish the names of everyone who was involved in almost sinking this economy–not just CEOs of big banks but mortgage lenders and peddlers of toxic junk sold around the world?
From my view, this is all about destroying public education and privatizing it for the benefit of good friends and campaign contributors. This is about having control of the curriculum to the point where schools don’t teach evolution, just creationism–and in a science class, too or that overpopulation is a myth or whatever else would satisfy a corporation agenda.
Let’s not forget the names of all those lousy newspaper repoters who led cheers for a run-up to a war with Iraq and WMD, the lousy papers that allowed this stuff to be printed and are doing the same lousy thing with a push for war with Iran. Talk about yellow journalism but they hold teachers accountable to the point of printing their names? It’s time for the NYT to take a good, hard look in the mirror.
So the data is not completely reliable! What else is new? How does one obtain reliable and honest data from a system that is unreliable and dishonest? Perhaps this event might evolve into intelligent educators coming together and figuring out some way to figure out which teachers are doing their job and which teachers are not.
I believe that individuals who cannot perform in a classroom can be retrained to administer reliable tests to children in September and then again in June. These same individuals can be trained to score these tests. This would certainly cut down on teacher and principal cheating. With a competent teacher, all children should make some progress in a school year even if they come into a grade three or four or five years behind.
And yes, teachers who demonstrate significant student improvement should receive significant pay increments. Teachers who demonstrate no improvement should be retrained to administer and score the tests.
Of course the teacher is important but I happen to believe that students have a responsibility for their own learning as well. They need to do their part by being prepared, studying for tests, paying attention, bringing necessary materials to class, etc. Parents are responsible as well. Can they show interest and support in what their kids are doing?
When these kids go out into the world and get a job, how far will they get if they don’t do their share of the work? They’ll get as far as the front door as they are shown the way out. Why are they not even mentioned as playing a vital role in the learning process?
The Times is venomously anti-public education. Check out their “objective reporting” of the controvery about Charter Schools in Williamsburg. This whole blog post is worth reading, but this is key: http://www.williamsburggreenpointschools.org/news “Most unsettling is the NY Times/WNYC SchoolBook coverage of the event, which features a picture of the few Harlem Success Academy parents in the auditorium and misleadingly states in the caption that “Parents turned out to support the co-location of Success Academy” at our local school. You have to read the comments to get any truth out of the article.
We’ll cut the journalist, Chelsia Rose Marcius a break, since she probably wasn’t even there that night. After all, she’s only an intern at SchoolBook and a student at NYU, as we learned before her editors later changed her byline to read “freelance journalist.” We’ll put the blame squarely on the “paper of record” itself, since hedge-funder and Success Academy founder Joel Greenblatt owns 178,299 shares in The New York Times. “
Despite any flaws in the data the city can still use it to successfully damage teachers’ reputations, rightfully or not, and weaken their union. The result, of course, is more bargaining power. The masses hate that teachers generally make more than the ignorant proles, who consider them overpaid baby-sitters. The NYT has shown repeatedly that they’re not above pandering to government powers in exchange for future “exlusives” and insider tips. Neither the paper’s executives nor the political powers they’re toadying up to give a damn about the quality of public school education – their brats are all in private schools!
As I said before, the NYT needs to take a good, hard look at itself before pointing fingers someplace else.
I am glad that someone brought up the professional sports analogy. Wouldn’t it just be great if Public Education just became as easy as firing that “bad” coach that went for it on 4th and 1 when you were screaming for the punt?!? Now THAT’S american! We hold a nice press conference for “bad” teachers to explain themselves after a bad testing by their students. That’ll show em! Those overpaid teachers with their “benefits” and “job security”. A math teacher can squeal “Regents?!? Regents” instead of “Playoffs?!?”
They need an owner like Al Davis (Bloomberg) and a mob of angry “blackhole” fans (like misinformed NYT readers) to get with the program!!! LOL.
In all seriousness I would be intrigued to read what Bill Gates wrote. My impression of him and education isnt a favorable one… but maybe I just need an Google-provided re-education program.
OH NYT! Great idea, but wrong group of people. NTY, you have a ridiculous argument, and just to show you how ridiculous, I will just change the name of the players:
Start with the group that truly controls America’s destiny and really rate them. Then, if that works, maybe some people would still be interested in blaming and the trashing teachers, but I doubt it.
O.K. Wall St. and the banks we have our microscopes out for you, and so here, NYT, is what we need to know first about them, the REAL sunjects of the inquiry.
Since MONEY is the lifeblood of any country, (just ask ancient Athens, and the current Athens too.) You money changers have the biggest effect of all. Did you know that some college students cheat just so they can work on Wall St? Isn’t that a bad way to start…who taught them that? Certainly not the teachers, because they sure don’t have the money, and if teachers were teaching cheating, then all the tests scores every where would be high. that’s not happening.
If we knew everything about the lives of the money changers and also all those corporate people losing all that military money in Irag, then I doubt if they would stray as much if THEY the Money people would be studied and put into files. Putting someone or a group under a microscope is really heinous, but certainly a huge part of human history. If the people in this nation had decent jobs and clean food water and clean congress people too, then I doubt if anyone would be blaming the teachers. if kids really saw a democracy that worked, then they would probably study more, but as it is now, they see that great minds and hard work don’t fare as well as disembling.
WE need to know WHO those people on Wall St. and the banks are that are in charge of the People’s money. We need to know what they did with the money and how they spend their money and their time too. If the People of WALL want to be high priests of money, then I think we all want them to be celibate too and spend all of their time in cells praying to mammon for us and not against us, and building up our interest. We will need dedicated reporters NTY…sort of a variation on a theme….deep throat, deep pockets..whatever. to follow this story.
If you had done this, NYT, instead of attacking the teachers, then maybe people like the Bernnie Ponzis could bever have happened in the FIRST place. We need to know that the handlers of the nation’s money are of high moral quality. Perhaps the NYPD would help out the NYT and start following these stock brokers , and handlers of pension funds and guardians of NGO’s and pension monies. You know, instead of following Muslims in New Haven and New Jersey, go Hollywood and FOLLOW the MONEY people around the world. If those money people were watched and followed and scruntinized, than maybe everything else in this listing and threatening to sink world would be able to right itself.This should be easy NYT, as I am sure a lot of Rupert’s people are looking for work.
So really, NTY, once i make a simple change of WHO should be investigated..my argumnet probably makes more sense than yours. if you are going to go after one group, then follow the money… not the test scores.
Note that despite the doubletalk about being aware of the limits of the ratings, in the headline, the NY Times uses the phrase “Teacher Quality” to describe what is being assessed. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/education/teacher-quality-widely-diffused-nyc-ratings-indicate.html?nl=nyregion&emc=ura1
The Teacher Data Reports just scratch the surface!
A lot of other information is available under the Freedom of Information Law.
Read the advisory opinion of Robert J. Freeman, the Executive Director of the NYS Committee on Open Government:
http://www.dos.state.ny.us/coog/ftext/f14287.htm
Instead of publishing unreliable data on teachers, why not publish accurate data on politicians? NYT could list, on a regular basis, FEC filings on all of the federal officeholders and candidates. that is some info we could really use.
There are no bad teachers and I can prove it.In my “spot on the map” we have 1,500 tenured teachers.last year one was fired.There that proves it.Moving on……….
As a former teacher, I can tell you that there is no adequate way to rate teaching. Every class is different and sometimes in a given year, a class can be enormously talented and a joy to teach – by class I mean ALL the fourth graders in school that year. This is a phenomena that teachers are very aware of. There are also specific classes that work so well together and do so well that they prove to be exceptional, making the teacher’s job easy. On the flip side, there are also years when the students in a single grade all seem to be difficult. No one really can explain this.
Then there are the teachers who, when given the opportunity to select their class, will very carefully select the very best students for themselves and dump the rest on the new teacher. I was once the victim of this as were several colleagues. A weak principal simply didn’t want to be bothered with keeping things fair and was too dumb to see that some corrections were needed. He blamed the teachers for not doing their job. What a joke!
You may think that teaching is all about what happens in the classroom, but there’s so much more that goes on. Savvy parents crowd the principles office to be sure their kid gets the best teacher. Poor people rarely have that news and get dumped in “anybody elses” class. This creates discention among teachers as well as parents.
While some schools do have mentoring programs for beginning teachers, many do not and the beginning teacher is left to his/her own devices. This is clearly insane. All teachers need to have the help and support of their colleagues, especially first, second and third year teachers. To set up a system where competition is more important than teaching is insane. I was lucky in my first years as I worked with teachers who wanted me to succeed and become the best I could be. Without them I would have looked for other work. Their knowledge, kindness and generousity made a good teacher of me. Everyone should have such luck.
Setting up a system of competition, points and fear is a sure way to destroy public education. I believe the right wingers who are hoping for a voucher system know this. And, by the way, the voucher system is a fraud. To offer $2,000 for private school is nonsense. Most such schools of any quality cost $10,000 a year at least. Poor people simply don’t have the remaining $8,000 to go there and will end up in schools run by poorly trained teachers and unlicensed “teachers” who are poorly paid and, frankly, haven’t a clue what they are doing.
Teaching is a difficult profession. The sooner it is recognized as such the better. Meanwhile, I think we need some kind of rating system for the genuises who have played around with our money and destroyed the economy. Ditto for Congress.
Elizabeth all this is a given.In fact it flows across every job in America.We all have stupid people(and good people )over us.Teachers have not cornered the market on that.But to say there is no measurable way to rate a teacher is really setting this up for…..well exactly the mess teachers unions are trying to co-opt at their worst.Job security over competence and results ,however hard to quantify, is not a good formula…